Since the Code Camp session I attended Saturday, I find myself surrounded by poker references. I knew I worked in a poker rich environment (most of the people I work with play alot.) The other day, while discussing a serious business issue with three other people, they made a poker analogy that everyone got but me.

Now I keep seeing media references. I have a subscription to wired (exclsuively for reading while waiting for coffee to brew - I keep it next to the coffee machine just for when I am too lazy to bring my latop downstairs), and noticed this article right away, when I first cracked open the August addition this morning. Today, while looking for something completely different, I found this and this.

I am feeling really left out (but probably not as broke) being a poker illiterate.

 

In comment to my Portland Code Camp 2.0, Jason Mauer, _the_ father of Northwest Code Camps, said there will be a Seattle Code Camp October 28/29 at the same location as last year (DeVry in Federal Way). Needless to say, I'll be there. I can't wait.

 

…was pretty good.

 Hi-lights:

• Scott’s Power Shell presentation. Filled a lot of cracks in the pavement of my power shell knowledge. Maybe this will get me using power shell more and I can reach critical mass.
• Wilco’s Iron Ruby presentation. I fealt dumb and lazy after this. How come I can’t build a compiler in a few months. I had the feeling, in this presentation, that I was in the presence of a future computer science super star.
• Jeff Berkowitz’s Poker Bot presentation. I wish this had lasted about 3 hours longer. Too bad I don’t actually know how to play poker. I may have understood more. Never the less, I knew enough to recognize some common patterns with securities trading. At a high level, it’s all about information theory. Just when we were getting to the good part, though, we had to break. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a hard coded strategy – from poker book strategy to C#. My next step would be to take a bunch of those strategies and put them in a genetic program, or even more like what I do, break them down by information atom and put them in a neural net to get weighted, running against Poker Academy. Poker Academy can’t beat the best players. Maybe it would be better to train bots against real poker game data, or on real online poker networks. Awesome presentation.

Low-lights:

• Too hot. Didn’t want to stay for outdoor BBQ. Bailed.
• Too short. Day 2 would have been good.
• The hotel I was looking forward to going to was full. We stayed in a really bad hotel and paid too much. Maybe planning ahead and making reservations is a good idea sometimes.

 

I sure hope we get to see another Seattle Code Camp, a *Con, or something along those lines before the year is over. If not, I might start driving to the Portland .NET users group meetings (in addition to ssdotnet.)

 

Facts:

• I live in Washington.
• It is illegal to post links to online poker sites in Washington.
• If someone comment spams me (see below image) with links to illegal poker sites, am I going to get in trouble?

I hope the answer is that the above mentioned law is struck down by something like this happening to someone, or the state turns it's infinite internet montioring powers to good by stopping comment spammers.

Neither outcome is likely, but one can hope.

Update: I've already gotten my first illegal comment to this post! It contains hundreds of links to illegal (in washington) gambling sites. I wonder if I should alert the authorities. Hmm...

 

I read hundreds of feeds just to keep up on what was going on in the .NET Developer world, and maybe a few other things as well. I cull or re-organize them every once in a while to try to make it easier for me to keep up (it's really not possible for me to spend 2 hours a day reading feeds.) But still, I spend enough time reading RSS that I often wonder if my time would not be better spent doing things instead of just reading about other people doing things.

Recently - and some not so recent - there have been several new RSS feeds I read which do a pretty good job of summarizing all the stuff I would have read anyway:

People News Sites (sites run by flesh and blood people with names and stuff):

* Jason Haley's Interesting Finds: 70% hit rate -i.e., I would have read 70% of this stuff myself in my own set of feeds. Why am I reading my own feeds then? Jason has all the good .NET stuff, plus some career and community stuff that I wouldn't normally be exposed to.

* Larkware News: Mike Gunderlow has been doing this for years. This is one of the very first feeds I ever subscribed to, and it gets better all the time. Also a very high correlation with my personal reading preferences.

* Sam Gentile: Also been doing this for a while. His New and Notables are 90% sutff I already read in other feeds (very high correlation!) but the ones I missed are usually great reads. In fact, I probably populated a good chunk of my OPML from his new and notables. His other articles are great too.

Group/Corporate/Less-Personal sites:

* Finserv Blog: All the Finderv news in one place. Good, financial-software related blogs.

* ACM Queue: Mostly articles, really, not links, but they have some good content.

* DotNetKicks: The inspiration for this post. They have a lower hit ratio for me (compared to some things mentioned above), but they have (or sometimes have) a larger volume of links, plus the discussion part. This could almost be the one stop shop for 90% of what I want to read.

* D-Zone: DotNetKick's dad. Everything I said about DotNetKicks goes for this site as well, but they have less .NET stuff.

* MSDN Just Published: I love having read an article before my friends who wait for the magazine to come in the mail.

* TheServerSide.NET: What can I say...this is one of the original RSS Aggregator portals for .NET developers.

* digg: I'm putting them last because of the potential negative impact I get from reading this stuff. Very little of it is actually useful for anything but party trivia, and it can quickly turn into a major timesink. It is, likely, the inspiration for lots of other link aggregator sites.

So just reading what was found above (as an experiment) this morning, it took me 25 to skim through everything, which is kind of a good savings. I will still probably keep readin lots of RSS feeds, but maybe only my top 30 favorites and the above mentioned portals (ex-digg) on weekdays.